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Pride

Pride is the recognition of the fact that you are your own highest value and,
like all of man’s values, it has to be earned—that of any achievements open to
you, the one that makes all others possible is the creation of your own
character—that your character, your actions, your desires, your emotions are
the products of the premises held by your mind—that as man must produce the
physical values he needs to sustain his life, so he must acquire the values of
character that make his life worth sustaining—that as man is a being of
self-made wealth, so he is a being of self-made soul—that to live requires a
sense of self-value, but man, who has no automatic values, has no automatic
sense of self-esteem and must earn it by shaping his soul in the image of his
moral ideal, in the image of Man, the rational being he is born able to create,
but must create by choice—that the first precondition of self-esteem is that
radiant selfishness of soul which desires the best in all things, in values of
matter and spirit, a soul that seeks above all else to achieve its own moral
perfection, valuing nothing higher than itself—and that the proof of an
achieved self-esteem is your soul’s shudder of contempt and rebellion against
the role of a sacrificial animal, against the vile impertinence of any creed
that proposes to immolate the irreplaceable value which is your consciousness
and the incomparable glory which is your existence to the blind evasions and
the stagnant decay of others.

The virtue of Pride can best be described by the term: “moral ambitiousness.”
It means that one must earn the right to hold oneself as one’s own highest
value by achieving one’s own moral perfection—which one achieves by never
accepting any code of irrational virtues impossible to practice and by never
failing to practice the virtues one knows to be rational—by never accepting an
unearned guilt and never earning any, or, if one has earned it, never leaving
it uncorrected—by never resigning oneself passively to any flaws in one’s
character—by never placing any concern, wish, fear or mood of the moment above
the reality of one’s own self-esteem. And, above all, it means one’s rejection
of the role of a sacrificial animal, the rejection of any doctrine that
preaches self-immolation as a moral virtue or duty.